Accountability

A hospital in a park

If you look at the plans for our new campus, you see one color more than any other: green. That’s no accident. We’re creating a hospital in a park.

And when we say a park, we mean it. MetroHealth’s 52-acre main campus currently has 1-2 acres of greenspace. We’re planning on increasing that to 25 acres, about half our property.

We want to turn our campus into something everyone in our neighborhood, not just patients and visitors, can enjoy. At the center of the plan is a 6- to 8-acre urban park between West 25th Street and Scranton Road, running from MetroHealth Drive to Interstate 71. The new park will give residents, patients and visitors a space to relax, walk and enjoy the outdoors. In addition, a MetroHealth wellness garden will be located south of the new patient tower.

Adding all this green to our footprint isn’t just about beautifying our campus. We’ll be able to incorporate therapies and arts in medicine programming into patients’ healing regimens. The health benefits aren’t just for patients. They’ll extend to anyone who lives, works and plays nearby. Did you know that spending time in and around greenspaces helps significantly reduce cortisol levels in your body, which can help lower your blood pressure and stress level? Heartbeat rates can be upwards of 20 beats per minute lower when walking in a park versus in a busy urban environment.

So much of the focus on our transforming campus has been about the new hospital that will be at its center, but we’re just as excited about what else we’re doing to improve our community. There’s so much more to our transformation than construction and new buildings.